Raymond Pearl

Raymond Pearl (3 June 1879-17 November 1940) was an American biologist and one of the founders of biogerontology.

Biography
Raymond Pearl was born in Farmington, New Hampshire in 1879, and he came from an upper-middle-class family. He attended Dartmouth College at the age of 16 and was the youngest member of his graduating class, and he received his PhD in zoology from the University of Michigan. Pearl stayed as an instructor there until 1906, and he later worked for the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maine. He spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he wrote 841 publications, popularized and communicated science, and founded biogerontology (the study of the biological aging process). He was also an initial supporter of the eugenics movement, but he came out against it in the late 1920s, criticizing the use of race in eugenics. Despite this, he remained classist and had some anti-Semitic views, and he supported birth control. He died in Baltimore in 1940 shortly after a visit to the Baltimore Zoo, during which he had complained of chest pains; he had a heart attack and died at the age of 61.